In a medical setting, different monitoring devices may be used to monitor different types of patients. Surgical patients and post-surgical patients in intensive care are typically connected to monitoring devices that continuously receive physiological data from these patients. Less acute patients may be monitored less frequently using vital signs devices, for example when a clinician periodically takes vital signs for the patients.
Physiological and other data obtained from these patients are often stored and displayed in different places. For example, systems that continuously monitor patients typically display patient data and also send the data to an electronics medical records (EMR) system where the data is stored. For less acute patients, monitoring devices, for example vital signs devices, may be portable and data from these devices may be obtained manually, written on a chart and put outside a patient's room.